But, unlike their counterparts here, they had a gift for slogans that don't make you turn away your face in embarrassment when you encounter them 40 years later. The best seem more like witty Zen aphorisms than an ideologue's dogma, more laughing monk than Commissar. This reactionary curmudgeon had the old news photo below stuck on up on my bulletin board for years, until I lost it in a renovation. I found it on the 'Net recently, and put it up again, partly as a warning never to waste a moment's ever- shrinking time.
When I showed it to my friends Jean- Louis and Catherine Lassez, a French couple who have lived out here on an old ranch to our south for almost as long as I have, they laughed-- they remembered the "Soixante Huitard's" slogans well, but had never heard an American cite one. Jean Louis found me an entire book, and to my amusement, many are still quotable and refreshingly un- ideological even by today's polarized standards.
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One of my favorites from '68 Paris is: "Beneath the paving stones, the beach!"
Debord keeps popping up in interesting places for me. First came across him in Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, which uses the last Sex Pistol's concert (the one in San Francisco, in '78) to launch a rambling history of connections between cultural movements, as with the Situationists and punk rock. Debord was also a key figure in psychogeography, a line of intellectual thought and experience that I somehow stumbled upon recently, and that claims Arthur Machen for one if its own. And just last year, I picked up a copy of Debord's A Game of War, an abstract and fairly sophisticated game (incorporating rules for supply, for example), that he published in '87, and that falls btwn chess and the military simulations of Avalon Hill and SPI. To find his name now on Querencia...well, I just have to smile. Ain't life fascinating.
DAMN, Richard-- that was going to be my next, because it is a favorite of the Lassez! But don't worry, I have more (;-))
Tell me more about psychogeography and Machen by email? (I think you have ours-- if not ask here). You know I have used a header from Machen...
Steve, there's no need for a separate e-mail, as my knowledge of both psychogeography and Manchen is pretty thin. In fact, now that I think about it, it was your header from Machen that sent me on a Google search to learn more about him -- leading quickly to Wikipedia entries on psychogeography and Machen, which reference each other. Machen was not explicitly a psychogeographer, having passed away before the French avant garde started developing its theories (which to me are largely unintelligible). But I'm intrigued enough to seek out writers who work, whether knowingly or not, with its ideas.
BTW, from which of Machen's works did you pull the quote? I haven't yet dug it up.
Steve, there's no need for a separate e-mail, as my knowledge of both psychogeography and Manchen is pretty thin. In fact, now that I think about it, it was your header from Machen that sent me on a Google search to learn more about him -- leading quickly to Wikipedia entries on psychogeography and Machen, which reference each other. Machen was not explicitly a psychogeographer, having passed away before the French avant garde started developing its theories (which to me are largely unintelligible). But I'm intrigued enough to seek out writers who work, whether knowingly or not, with its ideas.
BTW, from which of Machen's works did you pull the quote? I haven't yet dug it up.
I will have to dig re Machen-- it was from one of my old "Commonplace" (quote) books.
I know enough about him to figure he might not have been polite if their different times had allowed him to meet Monsieur Debord-- look for his opinion on the Spanish Civil War survey done among writers in England in the 30's. I think only he and Evelyn Waugh backed the right (more as cultural Catholic- Royalists than Falange I think but not the "PC" thing in their day!)
PS to Richard-- can you find me that Greil Marcus? I am almost apprehensive but intrigued.
PPS And were you there in '78? The punk rock connection here is thin but real, and the younger post- punks as well- a reader & correspondent, a Mexican born writer and biologist who teaches at Laramie and has good guns and rods, has a tale of a Mission of Burma show in Boston just after I left.
Six degrees is way too many...
What do you hear from Chatham?
Steve, I'll get you a copy of Marcus's book. I wasn't at the Pistols show at Winterland -- at the time, I was living at the other end of the continent, in the Boston area, where my interest in that music was starting to grow, thanks to college radio. I ended up spending an inordinate number of weekend nights in small, smoky clubs, fascinated by the din and the scene. One of my writers and I were reminiscing recently about those days. He, an ex-pat Brit, runs a stormwater-control department at small city here in California, and punk rock gave him "the freedom to be who I wanted to be." As for myself, watching a thousand teenagers screw up the courage to play guitar badly on stage surely influenced my decision to get into the magazine business.
But the zeitgeist of that era, its context of the Cold War, disco beats, and prog rock, vanished many years ago. Still, I'll occasionally put Mission of Burma, the Real Kids, the Lyres into the shuffle. Or the Damned. Like grabbing hold of a lightning bolt.
As for Russ, I haven't talked to him for a couple of months, but my impression is that he's doing well. He's completing a gallery in a coastal town in Marin, although no news as of our last conversation as to when it'll open. That'll be a must-hit event.
Jeez, Boston 78-- you aren't still ANOTHER reader who I carded at the Inn Square back then (eclectic music-- everything from the Roches to John Lincoln Wright (country) to an early version of the Cars (Ocasek & Orr, pragmatically enough), are you? This blog is one strange intersection.
Russ apparently left me a message complimenting the Book of books and has had dinner with Tom Quinn; JP Parker is doing interviews with them, all Q Blog "peripherals". Email "ebodio- at-gilanet-dot-com" and I'll send more...
As for the Inn Square, I think my friends and I visited it to hear Unnatural Axe (this was winter of '78 or spring of '79, before I headed back to California). The place was on a long E/W-running arterial between Harvard and MIT -- my memory says Mass Ave, but Google has the address on Cambridge St. I don't recall any other similar venues in that area, so yes, you may have carded me!
I'll drop you an e-mail later today....
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